OK. Please bear with me as I am new and this may be a fairly long post. We have a web
server in the US to process US websites and payments. Customers in the US can visit and
purchase items via a site (3 actually) that are hosted on this web server. It runs CentOS,
PHP, Apache, MySQL, etc...We have expanded to other countries,
including Canada and UK and we maintain a virtual server in each of those countries.
These virtual servers host "entry pages" for these specific countries, but if they purchase
items from our site, the actual purchase process is done from our US server. Our SEO
outsource company is telling us that our Google rankings are not very high in these
other countries because we only host very small parts of our sites local to those
countries. Sooooooooo.... Number one, Are they right? If we hosted full servers with
complete sites (including transaction processing) in those countries, our rankings
would increase? Number two.... Is there a "best practices" on how to accomplish this?
How do we host sites in foreign countries and still maintain a common MySQL database of
customers, transaction processing, etc... Please understand, I am not on the web dev
team, I am only part of the IT dept that has been tasked with finding a solution. I
appreciate any input you may have regarding this.